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8 Surefire Ways To Increase Engagement Facebook

According to a survey conducted by The Creative Group, more than 50% of advertising and marketing executives said they expect companies to increase their investment in Facebook this year.

Facebook is simple, you update your wall and people will flock to your page and respond, right? That is the dream that every business owner believes before they get started; or that is what they’ve learned from people who claimed to be ‘experts’ in this field.

Most of them tend to give up or stop updating their page when they aren’t seeing the results that they want despite their constant updates.

Here is the hard truth; people don’t want to hear about your products all the time. Why would they? When they’ve been bombarded daily with advertisements from all possible platforms – from TV, to radio broadcasts, giant billboards, and even while you’re surfing the web. Let’s face it; people don’t come to Facebook to see advertisements.

What scares these advertisers is that Facebook is built for the control of their users, which means they could choose to ignore these adverts if they want to.

To increase engagement on Facebook, you need to create content that is not only relevant but personal too. Based on my own experience with my brand and through analyzing what other brands do, I’ll share with you some methods that have helped me increase my Facebook page engagement and what I’ve seen worked well for others.

1. Ask Questions

Questions are a great way to spark dialogue with fans. It is probably the easiest way and one of the best methods to get people to respond to your posts.

Having said that, there are many types of questions that you can ask your fans. Here is a short summary to help you get started.

2. Timing

Timing is extremely important when it comes to posting on any social networks. Imagine updating your wall post when everyone is at work or when they are sleeping. It would be better to post after work or when people are in transit. These are the times that people are most likely to check for updates on their social network accounts.

According this post by Dan Zarella (@danzarrella), the best time to share on Facebook is noon and a little after 7pm.

A tool that I recommend to help you ease the work is Buffer. Buffer has proven to increase Facebook engagement as users are posting at the right times.

3. Photos

We’ve all heard the saying, a picture is worth a thousand words, right? On Facebook, a picture is worth much more than that.

Photos has to be one of my favorite ways to build engagement because they stand out better compared to status updates or posted links. Pictures are clear and concise and are easily digestible to the mind.

Leneys, a ladies fashion apparel company, uses photos to their advantage by posting pictures of multiple photos and asking their fans to choose their favorite.

This simple post alone helped them to receive over 51 comments, 52 likes and 55 shares and their fans are asking their friends too.

4. Facebook Contest

Contests are another great way to increase Facebook engagement because not only does this reward loyal fans, but also it creates excitement and will get users to visit your Facebook page frequently to check if they have won.

There are many types of contests that you can organize. Social media promotions platform, Binkd, for example, not only allows you to create a straight-forward sweepstakes contest but also more challenging contests that create engagement. Different contests can be structured to target the engagement that you would like from your audience. A ‘vote to win’ contest would get you likes, but not as many comments as the more challenging contests that would require you to write a tagline in the comment box.

Mari Smith recently organized a successful Facebook contest using Strutta. Her contest received over 392 entries from 377 unique entrants. Her contest also garnered 15,571 votes from 2,153 unique voters. One of her posts about the contest received over 50 shares, 42 comments and 150 likes and that is just one post.

5. Crowdsource For Answers

Rather than answering questions by yourself, why not get your fans to help others who are in need of tips and advice?

That is what Natural Parenting Tips, a Facebook page dedicated to helping parents is doing. Every day without fail, they update their page with questions from their fans. The idea is to crowdsource for tips and suggestions from their fanbase, which in turns helps other fans out. Watch how engaging your fanbase can be when your brand presents them with something they can relate well with.

6. Call To Action

Call to actions instill psychological nudges that help marketers drive their audience to respond the way that they want to.

One thing that most business owners or marketers tend to miss when they update their Facebook page is not having a ‘call to action’. Your audience tends to respond better when they are given specifics as to what to respond to.

What do you want people to do? Do you want them to comment? Click the like button? Share something with their friends?

Subway, an iconic American Franchise, fully understands the importance of the call to action. On their Facebook page, you’ll find them frequently adding the phrase, “Like” this if you … or Click “like” if you ___. This simple photo alone helped them get over 53,000 likes and 404 shares.

7. Facebook Ads

Seeing that only a small fraction of people gets to see your Facebook wall post, what you can also do to increase your page engagement is to promote it by using ‘page post story ads’, or Facebook’s most recent wall post promotion, which will help your wall posts get greater reach.

Below is an example of a page post – story ads from Mari Smith for one of their most recent social media courses.

8. Frequency Of Posting

The frequency of posting has also shown to have an effect on Facebook engagement.

According to a research by Buddy Media, pages that posted one or two times per day receives 40% higher user engagement compared to pages that had more than 3 posts per day. This shows that it is not the quantity of the post, but the quality of your Facebook wall post.

What works for your brand may not work for others. However, these guidelines are proven to have helped increase engagement because all of them utilize content that engages with the audience on a personal level.

What about you?

How have you increased your engagement with your customers and prospects on Facebook. What tactics have worked best for you?

How to Build Your Facebook Customer Acquisition Machine

I definitely think of all the social media platforms, Facebook is the hardest to engage. This is a nice simple guide to get people started though…I find that funny pictures/quotes always get the most likes and shares as well.

Yes! funny photos/quotes are more general and people are able to relate to it easily compared to normal niche/industry post. Having start a couple of pages, I actually think Facebook is easier to build engagement because it doesn’t feel so “crowded” compared to twitter.

Hi Aaron, this is a great post. I really love the table with the examples of Facebook questions. I think this is really useful for those who are starting out. I’ve just saved a copy of this image to my desktop and will use it to constantly refresh! Thanks so much :-)

This is a good post, but reader BEWARE! You aren’t actually allowed (technically) to run contests or competitions on your commercial FB page – everyone does, but you could have you page shut down immediately and lose all those lovely fans you’ve accumulated. Neither are you allowed to advertise your website, telephone number or encourage likes explicitly on your cover photo… oh all the small print… it’s very small indeed. But the last thing you want to happen is to lose the investment in time you’ve spent on your page, so tread carefully and make informed decisions!

Hi Nicky, you’re spot on with that, not many people are aware that we aren’t allowed to run contest on our Facebook page without an application. That is where apps like Binkd, Strutta (mentioned above) comes to play. Thank you for adding this into the conversation Nicky.

Another great post I’ll be happy to share with my followers.
As much as I love Buffer for some of my tweets I don’t see any advantage for using anything but Facebook itself for Facebook updates though. Thoughts?

Nice points there and you summed them up under one post quite well. I was hoping if you could share your opinion or two about one such insurance company used content relevant to times and carried out communications in a way that drove led to an impressive 49% increase in the interaction.
windchimes.co.in/blog/2012/07/growing-facebook-interactions/

The “like” and “comment” rates for frequency of posting is slightly misleading. Of course 1 post a day is going to have a higher comment/like ratio. It’s the only post that will show up on the user’s wall. If you have 15 posts a day, they’re not going to clutter a user’s wall with every single post. So, each post’s comment/like ratio will obviously be lower.

I’d rather have 10 posts with 1,000 likes and 200 comments opposed to one post with 200 likes and 50 comments.

I´m having a huge doubt about promoting posts? SHOULD I PROMOTE MORE THAN ONE POST AT THE SAME TIME? Is there any problem with that? I don´t know if two, for instance, promoted posts running simultaneously will hamper the performance of one another… Need some guidance with that! Thank you!

P.S.: If you guys see this question on other posts of yours, just need to answer one of them… hihihihi… Sorry for that! :-)

Excellent post!!! Facebook marketing has become very important aspect of social media marketing. And how to take up the campaigns in fb is also a very vast topic to understand. The above points which you have highlighted as going to be very helping in planning such campaigns.

I hadn’t really considered Facebook Ads, but once you get to grips with them they are so easy to create and manage. Within a hour of setting up an ad campaign I was getting likes and reaching new people all across the globe.

Facebook is undeniably the best platform to drive traffic to your website and/or sell products or services. But what about Google+. I find this a wonderful platform as well and I see lots of people are using it too but is it also a viable channel to market your blog or drive traffic to your website? There are also lots of good contents there..,

That’s exactly what I was looking for. I have tried many different strategies but unfortunately I am still unable to engage my followers (as I have only few) but this is something which can go viral if implemented properly.

I believe invite friends is also a good option for getting fans. Like I had 200 friends and 80 of them liked my page where I asked my friend also to invite his friends and we got 400 likes from his group. In an average we have more than 10000 page views per months.

Hey,
I have a new Facebook page selling framed designs for baby nurseries and other designs for the home.
My posts are reaching very few people. Currently I have 322 likes, the majority of them were got from a ‘Promote Your Page’ ad campaign. I’m getting practically 0 likes, comments and shares on the content I put up.
I’m unsure as to what I should be sharing/writing on the page apart from uploading photos of my designs. I want to keep my followers engaged but at a loss on how to do that.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

This article was appears to have been writer 4 years ago and a lot has changed with FB since then. Basically, you now have to pay to play. IF you are not paying to boost your posts the only people that will see them are people who have opted to receive notifications from your page. Facebook in turn has made that option even harder for the average person.

I noticed that there are some changes from FB system. I have a FB Page with 100 subscribers, with my daily posts were able to be seen by average 20 people everyday.

However starting Apr 2017, almost 90% of my posts on my Page were not able to be seen.
I guess Fb have reshuffled all the ads appearance on every FB user’s newsfeed, and FB posts from FB Page that are with less Likes or followers always sink to bottom.

Would you kindly show us some ways on how to stay ahead of such kind of rivalry, while using free method of fb marketing ?

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